Before stepping into the shower, she stared at herself in the bathroom mirror. She suddenly looked very old and tired for twenty-six. She had parted ways with God at the age of twelve, but found herself praying for him to let her find a way out of the game.
As she stepped out of the shower, a heavy fist slammed into her nose, snapping the cartilage into several pieces. Reflexively, Tatiyana put her hands up to her face as she collapsed backward, her warm blood pouring down her chin. The back of her head smacked hard against the shower wall, cracking the vinyl lining. Tears and blood had blinded her so that she could not see her executioner’s face, but she could feel his calloused hands flipping her onto her stomach. She flailed at him. He swatted her arms away and placed his knee on her spine, cupping his hands under her chin. First, her windpipe collapsed as he snapped her head back. Then her spine cracked.
In that split second before she lost consciousness forever, Tatiyana thought God had finally answered her prayers. She was out of the game.
Saturday, March 6th, 2004
Bob Healy moved around the house picking up six months worth of newspapers, TV Guides, magazines, etc. George was right about the house being a mess, and papers were an easy place to start, but Bob’s sudden cleaning had more to do with nervous energy than anything else. Joe Serpe was on the way over. Finally, after three weeks, they had some concrete pieces to the puzzle, something more than guesses on which to hang their hats. Then the phone rang and some of the puzzle pieces began to change shape. “Hey big brother.” It was George. “If you’re calling me, it’s not good news,” Bob said. “Good and bad.”
“Christ, not again.”
“You want to read about it in the papers tomorrow or hear about it now?”
“Okay, George.”
“Good news first. The results are in from the second tests on the blood splatter samples from the Reyes murder scene. Your hunch was right on. They found a second contributor in one of the blood samples.”
“What’s the bad news?”
“It wasn’t the Strohmeyer kid.”
“I knew it,” Healy said.
“Hey, don’t get weepy on me, big brother. It’s not like the kid was Mother Theresa. He did beat some poor drunk Mexican to death with a shovel.”
“I know. It just confuses the issue. So who is-”
“So far, he’s a John Doe,” George said.
“That’s just great.”
“Well, maybe John Doe’s not the right name. Maybe Ivan Doesky would be more accurate. Seems the second contributor was of Slavic descent.”
“Russian?”
“Could be. Why?”
“What, I can’t be curious?”
“For the last few weeks whenever you get curious, I get headaches. So what is it?”
“Maybe nothing.”
“The flip side of maybe nothing is maybe something.”
“Shit, little brother, the doorbell’s ringing. I gotta go.” Click.
Bob Healy was lying about the doorbell, but just as he put the phone back in its cradle Joe Serpe knocked on the front door.
They sat at the kitchen table, Joe Serpe doing most of the talking.
“Here’s what I think happened,” he said. “Steve Scanlon has a source for black market oil and he was using Frank’s yard to do illegal truck transfers from a nine thousand gallon tanker to his trucks. That’s what Cain and Donna saw that night.”
“Why use Frank’s yard and not his own?”
“Size, for one thing. You couldn’t possibly maneuver a tanker and two trucks in Scanlon’s yard. It’s small to begin with and he shares it with other companies. Frank’s yard is big enough to accommodate a tanker and two smaller trucks. Besides, it’s got a layer of crushed concrete which would stand up to all that weight in bad weather.”
“How’d he get access to the yard?” Healy asked.
“That’s easy-Dixie. We all had keys to the yard in case Frank was sick, wanted a day off, or if we had to work the odd Sunday. Dixie resented the fact that Frank wouldn’t put him on his own truck full time and he probably jumped at the chance to make extra cash and stick it to Frank at the same time.”
“It’s a long way from screwing your boss to murder. Black market oil, is it really worth killing over?”
“Let’s say the rack price of oil-”
“Rack price?”
“That’s how much an oil company pays wholesale at the loading terminal,” Joe explained. “Okay, so let’s say the rack price is a buck a gallon and you’re charging your customers a buck twenty-nine-nine per gallon at two hundred gallons, that’s almost sixty bucks gross a stop. You got three trucks out averaging twenty stops a truck, that’s thirty-six hundred bucks a day. Multiply that by six days a week. That’s over twenty-one grand a week. And that’s legitimate.
“Now let’s say I can buy oil at fifty or sixty cents a gallon and I’m still charging my customers a buck twenty-nine-nine a gallon at two hundred gallons. So even if it’s a warm winter, you can make out like a bandit if you’re buying way below rack. Plus, think of how much cash you can launder given the price difference between rack oil and black market. Is it worth killing for? You do the math. I’ve known crackheads to kill for a roll of Canadian pennies.”
Healy was still skeptical. “So if this is such a great scam, why hasn’t anyone done this before?”
“They have, but a steady supply of black market oil is almost impossible to come by. Oil is one of the most regulated businesses on the planet. From the time it’s pumped out of the ground, every gallon of it’s got to be accounted for. Frank used to have to be able to account for every gallon he loaded and pumped. The shipping and pipeline companies, the refineries, the companies that pump the oil all have to account for every gallon they pump. Oil companies get audited all the time and you have to have bills of lading to cover every drop of oil you deliver. That’s how people get caught. Even if you can get oil on the black market, you can’t get legit bills of lading.”
“So you think Scanlon has a way to get black market oil and bills of lading?”
“Yes and no.”
Healy was confused. “Yes and no what?”
“I think Scanlon is fronting for someone else. I think Black Gold Fuel was a trial balloon, a test to see if the system was workable. When his partners saw the system worked, they tried to have Scanlon buy Frank out. When he wouldn’t sell, they tried blackmailing him into it. When he still wouldn’t sell, that’s when the shit hit the fan and things got out of control.”
“If the system worked, why not go in big?” Healy asked.
“No, these guys are too smart. They want to stay below the radar screen. Once they get noticed, they’re dead. My guess is they plan to follow a model of starting very, very small and buying out slightly bigger sized companies. Instead of having one big operation that makes a nice fat juicy target for the feds, they’ll have five or six small operations that will pump just as many gallons, but won’t get noticed. We’re talking millions and millions of dollars a year here.”
“I’m sold, Joe. Wait a second.”
Bob Healy got up from the table and retrieved some papers from the kitchen counter and sat back down. First, he showed Serpe the newspaper article about the dead woman found at JFK.
“Holy shit! That’s the blond from the blackmail video. That’s her tattoo. Slave, huh?”
“Wait, it gets better,” Healy said, sliding a handwritten note in front of Serpe. “Look who the black Lincoln Navigator is registered to.”
“Black Sea Energy.”
“Yeah, I think we just found Steve Scanlon’s silent partner. But I wonder how some city fireman got hooked up with these guys?”